Doctor Who_ The Room With No Doors - Kate Orman [88]
She clucked, agitatedly. The whole population of this backward, wet world might be in danger, if the Caxtarids took a shine to them. The humans had few technical skills, but they might still make useful slaves. Or tasty meals.
We should never have come here. Should never have made our escape. But what choice did we have?
Over and over she saw those frantic hours aboard the Caxtarid vessel. A great, long, metal ship, shaped like a needle, stabbing through hyperspace.
There had been sixty of her species aboard, slaves fresh from Kapteyn 5, still astonished and angry and even panicked by their new condition. Forty had died in the escape attempt.
Foolish Caxtarids, to have left together so many Technicians, so many Warriors. . . but the leader of the rebellion was a mere Gardener, with reasons of her own.
She had planned everything so carefully, knowing that once the Caxtarids realized what was happening, no plan would be enough to resist their anger.
All the guards the rebels had posted, all the equipment they had hoarded, all of it meant nothing in the end.
The rebellion had started when the chimes for third shift had echoed through the vessel. Sudden and silent, the Warriors pulling on their purloined armour and grasping their stolen weapons. The Technicians silently forcing new instructions into the ship’s systems. The Gardeners rising from their work in the hydroponics area with cold black eyes. All with their instructions mem-orized, plans of the ship, weak points in the Caxtarids’ defences, the timetable of actions to be taken, everything.
And in the end it had been a desperate, running battle, as their plans were crushed by the Caxtarids’ superior numbers and weapons and cruelty, and they’d been running for their lives to the escape pods, cut off from the small 179
fighter ships, cut off from one another, the narrow corridors crammed with the bodies of slaves and slavers.
It was nothing to be proud of. Nothing. Talker clucked again, wishing she had an egg to sit on, wishing she had a hill to pluck the weeds from on a warm afternoon. This was not what she had wanted to do with her life.
She brushed a wing over the cool metal surface of the pod. ‘I can’t even do anything for you,’ she murmured.
The human, Misht Jate, was walking up. Talker opened her eyes, cocking her head to watch the alien.
‘Hello, Talker,’ she said. ‘How are you?’
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Talker said. ‘We can’t. . . do anything about the pod, so we might as well hand it over to our enemies. It won’t be of any use to them, so what damage will be done?’
‘I don’t think we can ask you to do that,’ said the human. ‘And it would be your decision, Talker.’
‘True,’ she squawked. ‘I’m the one with the gun.’
‘So I suggest you run,’ said Penelope.
She slapped her hand, palm first, on to the pod.
Talker looked down to the metallic object stuck to the pod. She looked back up at the human. She decided not to shoot her She leapt straight into the air and flew as far and as fast upwards as she could.
Penelope was almost knocked over by the force of Talker’s explosive flight.
She leant back, watching the bird shooting up into the air like a cannon ball.
A moment later, she felt a gigantic, invisible force grab her, harder than the insane tuggings of the fourth dimension.
‘Chris!’ she screamed, as the force dragged her to her knees.
He was there in an instant, hovering, not sure of whether to touch her.
‘Does it hurt? What’s it doing?’ he demanded.
But she couldn’t speak. The thing dragged her bodily across the ground, knees scraping in the dust. Her hands flung themselves out towards the metal.
‘Is it trying to communicate?’ Mr Cwej was shouting. ‘Can you hear anything in your mind?’
Penelope’s hands were wrenched forward and slapped hard on to the metal of the pod, fingers spread. She felt the coldness of the metal, its smoothness, and then she felt a rushing power of such intensity